Hi, I’m Keely Aarnes. I am the Assistant Vice President of Business Operations here at Northwell Health. We are a 24-bed hospital system in New York and over 800 physician practices. My responsibilities at Northwell include our enterprise master patient index, along with our patient identity strategy.
We currently use Verato’s Auto-Steward®, and we have been partnering with Verato for about the last two years. We were originally introduced to their solution about three years ago, and we were looking for a better way to manage our disparate data sources and applications. We largely grew out of mergers and acquisitions and have multiple source data, and we were challenged with stewarding our identities across these systems.
And so we began using Auto-Steward® as a solution to leverage referential data on top of the algorithms that we had internally, so that we could better determine if different records were of the same person from different sources. We send this information to Verato daily. They send back what we call the answer key, and we use that to make very informed and accurate decisions on whether potential dupes are the same person or entirely different patients.
We also use Verato’s Auto-Steward® to do roster compares. So again, speaking about mergers and acquisitions, we use them to do the analysis up front before we ingest any patient information or backloads into our systems, as opposed to just bringing in all that data and then later having to clean it up.
And really, the big piece of this is being the underpinning of what we do in our digital front door strategy, which has really been a major initiative across our healthcare entity, really trying to drive and create a new and special experience for Northwell patients. Being that we’re in New York, we’re in a very highly competitive market, as you can imagine. We wanted to go beyond what was offered from EHR portals, which we also have in production today. That EHR vendor portal is really the table stakes when you think about portals: the ability to manage appointments, pharmacy refills, clinical discharge summaries, radiology and laboratory results.
But we wanted to go beyond that, and we couldn’t find anything in the market at the time, anything off the shelf. So we decided to take this new, radical direction in creating our own digital front door for Northwell, a white-labeled experience where we could create an emotional connection that would differentiate us from our competitors in the market. We could bring together data elements that we had never really used in healthcare, like empathetic data elements, to create stickiness and personal connection in an application. We wanted to move beyond the transactional experience, where it’s scheduling an appointment, then the clinical interaction, then billing, and it ends until the patient needs us again. We wanted to create a meaningful experience that brings the patient back to their portal to interact with us at Northwell.
And again, moving beyond accessing medical records, over time we are now beginning to layer on CRMs and other insights that we gather, even from a one-on-one experience with a patient, and then surface that data back in a meaningful workflow at the time that it’s needed. That will create this emotional connection to our patients, which we were not able to find in the market.
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